From a photograph by Solomon D. Butcher of four daughters of rancher Joseph M. Chrisman, at their sod house in Custer County, Nebraska. From left to right, Harriet, Elizabeth, Lucie, and Ruth. Photographed in 1886.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Hoping for a Snow Day

Life in the Nebraska Sandhills... Another Trip Down Memory Lane...

It's a bleak and rainy day here. Tomorrow we have a chance of rain turning to snow in the afternoon. There won't be any significant accumulation, but it's going to turn cold for a few days.

As I took Isaac to school this morning, he was hoping for enough snow that school would be cancelled. It brought to mind a silly little thing I said when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, about this time of the year.

School had been let out for the day, and we students (all six or eight of us) spilled out of the little schoolhouse with our lunchboxes. It was windy and chilly, and the sky was gray. I announced to the Horner girls in a voice of authority, "Look at that sky! It looks like we'll be getting some snow tonight." In truth, I wasn't sure what the sky looked like when snow was imminent, but I had heard my dad say things like that, and it sounded good.

It sounded good because we children liked snow and plenty of it! We hoped for a heavy snow so our teacher would cancel school for the day. The snow had to be deep because if the teacher thought she could get to the neighborhood, she'd call someone on the school board to meet her with a tractor and get her through the drifts to the schoolhouse.

Every activity and chore in ranch life was made a hundred times more difficult when there was a heavy snow, so our parents were always hoping that it wouldn't snow just as hard as we were hoping that it would.

IT IS STILL BEST to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasure; and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.(Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1867-1957)